h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've mentioned before that I sometimes don't trust my reactions to beauty. I've wandered around art galleries wondering whether I'm really feeling what I think I'm feeling, or whether I just think that's what I should be feeling and so fool myself that I'm feeling it. Poetry, ditto. And I've sometimes even felt that in reaction to nature's beauty. Am I just faking this emotion?

I hardly think I'm alone in that. It's probably a stage most people go through. Stephen Fry captures it perfectly in an evocative passage in The Liar. Which brings me to prose. Prose has been my rock. I trust myself with prose. I either like it or I don't, and I trust that this is real.

And, recently, everything else has become more real too. Perhaps I trust myself more than I used to. Perhaps I'm growing up. Or something.

And then I started reading a collected volume of American short stories. And now I have no idea what I think of prose either. I'll read a story, put the book down, and wonder what on Earth it was all about and what on Earth do I think of it. And I have no idea. Honestly, none.

TRiG.

I think that's absolutely as it should be. Why should I be over the moon about a tub, just because Joseph Beuys placed it somewhere as a piece of art?

http://media.wz-interaktiv.de/85/200x125_738585.jpeg

There's a very funny story connected with this tub: it was brought to some exhibition, filled with plaster and stuff, but not yet positioned, but kept in a side room. Some people cleaned it to rinse their glasses in it.

People call it 'Modern Art' - I call lost of it rubbish.
I've seen various pieces in Tate Modern which I liked, or found very clever, though.

But that was the whole point of the piece, challenging the museum as an authority

oh don't get me started on Joseph Beuys.

You either like a piece or you don't. Sometimes you don't like them but they still give you food for thought - some pieces (writing, poetry whatever...) just have nothing to communicate to me.

One place I really like is the Museum Insel Hombroich (Mala and Tav wrote an entry about it but I'm too idle to look it up)

It has pieces by some very famous artists (I think there is at least one Picasso) but... none of the pieces are labelled. So generally you don't get people going past perfectly good pieces, not paying attention to them, then stopping in front of a Picasso and going "oh fantastic... gush gush dribble". And some of the work there is very challenging. But I like modern art. Even likes that one.

As for reading. I've recently read a short story collection by some of the 'greatest' 20th century writers. I can't say that I enjoyed any of them. But most of them had a certain something that made me stop and wonder. Or marvel at a turn of phrase or something. But in general: I can only really remember one of them. A sort of Margaret Atwood style non-sci-fi but sci-fi piece.

I once visited an exhibition of art by Yoko Ono. (I was bored, OK?)It consisted mainly of photographs of genitalia, except for the centrepiece, a very large, dazzlingly white room. Stepping inside, it appeared to be completely empty, but eventually something caught my eye in the centre. Walking over, it resolved itself through the glare to be something thin and white, with something green on top. It turned out to be a pedestal upon which sat a Granny Smith apple.

A small label on one side read:

Apple (organic)

I think fine art is often more intellectual than emotional, and intentionally so. Friends who've survived art school talk about the difficulty of this, not that they can't do that kind of conceptual art but that there is a requirement for it to be separated from emotion and the body (I think it's not as bad as it used to be). I'm not saying that one doesn't have an emotional response to looking at fine art, just that the whole context is more conceptual.

People also have intuitive response. I like the description of Ono's work, and feel a curiosity about it before I've even thought about it too much, whereas the tub one just makes me feel jaded (another contemporary artist challenging the orthodoxy or the Emperor's clothes but still buying into it ).

We once had to do an installation piece at Uni - we were meant to take a room and transform it, using a wood-based material.

My group was given the central staircase, which was well-proportioned, bright, and quite attractive in a neoclassical sort of way.

The professor thought it was "out of date" and should be modernised. We thought this was silly.

So we bought several boxes of charcoal briquettes and bricked up all the windows.

The professor thought it was brilliant. A big failure for us...

Professors of anything arty are a bit odd, aren't they?

TRiG.

I'm currently about half way through volume two, and am getting on a little better with it. I think I've got the hang of the editor's taste at this stage.

TRiG.

It was beauty you were talking about, but I've just had a similar bafflement. An old man from the wilds of Mayo - he does a lot of nature writing, and he's convinced if he still lived in Dublin it would have killed him years ago - came out with the throwaway statement:

"you have to tailor the live you're living to the energy you have."

I can't make my mind up whether that's an obvious truism, or a remark of staggering profundity.

That reminds me of spoon theory. That may not be what he was saying, of course, but that too is both obvious and profound.

http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory-written-by-christine-miserandino/

TRiG.